Evil Awoke Slowly
by the frog princess
Summary: How Katrina survived her cryopod failure--and what caused it to fail at all.


Evil awoke slowly ... and with a pounding headache. Gasping for breath, she clawed at the hatch, but she could not make it open. Something was terribly wrong. She tried to calm herself by remembering the warning she'd been given about the rigors of cold sleep. Perhaps one always felt this badly on awakening. 

No, she was not a person to retreat into denial. Something was wrong. She had sensed it all these years, had to call upon the deepest mystic forces to fight it off in during what had seemed like an eternity of cold. Now, as she raggedly drew stale air into her lungs, she knew she had won the fight ... but not unscathed. 

To have sensed anything during the past two decades was impossible. Cold sleep chambers were like time capsules that time, and thus awareness, could not penetrate. But awareness had reached her ... as had time. 

She pounded on the lid of chamber that was very nearly her crypt and screamed. It was not a scream of terror, but of rage. And the screaming did not stop. 

* * * * * 

His eyes snapped open. An inhuman shrieking echoed through the landing pod. But he knew, with an instant certainty, that the sound was human. "No," he moaned. "It's not possible." 

Shakily, he stood. Around him, the other convicts were shrugging off the lingering exhaustion, but none had yet managed to stand. Slowly he moved down the row of sleep chambers toward the one that had not yet opened. 

There was no point in delaying the moment any longer. He reached out and popped the seal. With the seal broken, the already blood-curdling screams seemed to magnify a hundredfold. He felt himself knocked back by the power of it, not the sound, but the fury behind it. 

In an instant, the screaming stopped and a woman rolled out onto the floor. He did not recognize her, but he knew who she was. His heart pounded in his chest as he realized what had gone wrong. All he could do was stare at her as she coughed and panted at his feet. She looked up at him and, finding her voice, demanded, "What the hell are you staring at?!" 

He could not answer her. He merely shook his head. He felt tears come to his eyes. He wasn't even sure what he was crying for but he couldn't make the tears stop. 

She was taken aback by his reaction and, for the first time in her life, her voice took a timid tone. "What's wrong?" 

He still did not answer, but he did not need to. She seemed to just notice the hair cascading over her shoulders. She examined the grey-streaked locks as if looking at a foreign thing. Her hair shouldn't have streaks of grey in it. It especially wasn't supposed to be long. Indeed, her last prison had cut her hair ridiculously short. She began to tug at it, to convince herself that it was attached to her own head. And then she noticed her fingernails. In her rage, she had already broken all of them, but even the jagged nails that remained were longer than her nails had ever been, longer than she had ever seen anyone's nails. 

And she realized what the battle for her survival had been. It was literally just that, a struggle for survival. She had unconsciously summoned her strongest, darkest powers and kept herself alive by magic alone. Her cold sleep capsule had failed. The others awoke as if time had stood still but, for her, every second that ticked by had been a second off of her life. 

She began to cry. Not great sobs or dramatic sniffling, she would not allow herself such self pity, only quiet tears that trickled down her face. She had been cheated. She had not just been cheated of twenty years of her life, but of twenty years of the prime of her life. She was supposed to be young. She was supposed to be beautiful. 

Instead ... the young boys who had flirted shamelessly with her as they settled into their sleep capsules now were averting their eyes. The few who did meet her eyes were looking at her with pity ... or amusement. There were a few who were perfectly pleased to see her in ruin. 

"Shepard," she whispered. 

He knelt down beside her. "Yes." 

"Stay with me." 

"I'm here, Katrina." 

"Stay with me forever," she insisted. "You're all I have left. You must promise me that you will never leave me." 

"I promise." 

"Promise me!" she hissed. 

"I promise," he repeated. 

"Promise me." 

"I promise ... ." Their chant continued until she slipped back to sleep, the first real sleep she had had in decades. He vowed to himself that he would keep his promise. In his own mind, it was just a day before that he had tampered with her sleep capsule so that it would fail just a few months into their journey. He had expected her to be long dead by the time he awakened. Now, cradling his sister in his arms, he remembered the little girl he had loved as a child. He would atone for the horror he had brought upon her. 

THE END


End file.
